Revolutionary is a tool to give you S-OFF on your phone and optionally flash a custom recovery image to your Android phone. A custom recovery image allows you to perform advanced tasks on the system partition, such as flashing custom ROMs and taking a full backup of your phone (a “nandroid” backup). We recommend installing the custom recovery image for all users who want rooted phones.

The current version of Revolutionary, 0.4pre4, is a developer preview. We still haven't made it perfectly easy to use for everyone, but we want power users and developers to be able to get started. If you're not a developer, feel free to try it out anyway; but you'll have to be patient with us while we iron out the wrinkles.

Revolutionary comes with NO WARRANTY (express or implied), and NO GUARANTEE OF FITNESS for any particular task. Although we have attempted to minimize the risk the best we can, the authors disclaim any chance of damage to your phone. The entire risk of running Revolutionary lies with you, the user.

Why do you need my serial number?
We use your serial number to generate your unique beta key to use revolutionary.

Why do I need a beta key?
We introduced the beta key mechanism so that if problems/bricks occur we can stop generating beta keys to prevent more people being affected.

I don't want to give you my serial number!
That's fine, stable releases will not require a beta key, however there may be significant time between a beta and the subsequent stable release.

Does Revolutionary give me root?No. You will need to flash this zipfile from recovery.

What does this do, then?
revolutionary will give you S-OFF either by a patched HBOOT or setting the secureflag to off on the device itself. This behaviour will depending on your particular device. Optionally it will also replace the stock Android recovery with a custom one, which adds many features including “nandroid” backups, the ability to use custom ROMs, and a greater amount of flexibility and customization of your Android phone.

Does this permanently unlock the NAND flash on my phone?Yes. The default configuration of this tool disables the phone's security, which also disables the NAND locks placed on the storage by the bootloader.

Are any drivers required?
On Linux, the program is self-contained. For Windows users, please install the fastboot drivers available here.

I'm running Linux and it won't detect my device!
Either run the program with root permissions, or add appropriate udev rules to the file /etc/rules.d/51-android.rules. Instructions are available at the Android Developers website.

The program hangs when “waiting for the system to settle.” -OR- the program says “Communications with phone unexpectedly interrupted.”
Uninstall any programs that may connect to the phone over USB and automatically sync. Specifically, we have had interference from HTC Sync and Doubletwist in the past; other programs may also cause trouble. Try reinstalling the drivers, if all else fails (or use Linux, which has a 99% less sucky USB stack).

Titanium Backup says that I'm not rooted, even though I ran Revolutionary and flashed the root zip from recovery.
Install Busybox from the Market to fix this.

Will you release the source code?
At this time, we are not disclosing the vulnerability we have exploited.

That doesn't seem fair! Android is about open source.
In some senses, we agree; but at times, a tradeoff needs to be made. Releasing the source code for this, we believe, would compromise the greater ability to unlock devices like these in the future. Given the choice between sacrificing the liberty of running code on our handsets and the liberty of reading the code by which we unlock it, we feel that the millions of handsets are more important. It is unfortunate that we must make such a choice, and we look forward to the day in the future that no such decision need be made.

Where can I get support?
As an experiment, we'd like to redirect users to our IRC channel for support. If you have an IRC client already, connect to irc.freenode.net, channel #revolutionary – if you don't, then that's OK; you can use Freenode's web IRC client. We'd love to hear from you!